More specifically, I think modern man can practice the spiritual exercises of antiquity, at the same time separating them from the philosophical or mythic discourse which came along with them. The same spiritual exercise can, in fact, be justified by extremely diverse philosophical discourses. These latter are nothing but clumsy attempts, coming after the fact, to describe and justify inner experiences whose existential density is not, in the last analysis, susceptible of any attempt at theorization or systematization. Stoics and Epicureans, for example—for completely different reasons—urged their disciples to concentrate their attention on the present moment, and free themselves from worries about the future as well as the burden of the past. Whoever concretely practices this exercise, however, sees the universe with new eyes, as if he were seeing it for the first time. In the enjoyment of the pure present, he discovers the mystery and splendor of existence. At such moments, as Nietzsche said, we say yes “not only to ourselves, but to all existence.” It is therefore not necessary, in order to practice these exercises, to believe in the Stoics’ nature or universal reason. Rather, as one practices them, one lives concretely according to reason.
— Hadot 1995, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 210.
To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. // Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.
— Wittgenstein 2014, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.45.
A Ransacking
26.02.25
Pierre Hadot, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, aims to confront our understanding of the Western philosophical tradition by arguing that philosophy was conceived in antiquity as a form of spiritual exercise.1placeholder To explain this, I want to highlight four aspects of his thought relevant to my reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an exemplary work of philosophy: Hadot’s depiction of ancient philosophy as a practical conversion; his characterisation of spiritual exercise as an exercise of reason promoting a right-seeing of the world; his account of the transformation of philosophy into theory; and his idea of the creation of new meaning through translation and mistranslation. Then, with Hadot’s metaphilosophy in hand I will consider his own analysis of the Tractatus, directly.
03.03.25, i.
Originally, philosophy was a way of life. “This is not only to say that it was a specific type of moral conduct […] Rather, it means that philosophy was a mode of existing-in-the-world, which had to be practiced at each instant, and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual’s life.”2placeholder One underwent a conversion (a word Hadot uses as the motif of his view of philosophy) into a new life. “Indeed, to be a philosopher implies a rupture with what the skeptics called bios, that is, daily life”.3placeholder One came to philosophy as to a temple, yearning, open, enthusiastic for wisdom. Philosophy was “at one and the same time, conscious of the fact that wisdom is inaccessible, and convinced of the necessity of pursuing spiritual progress.”4placeholder This love of an impossible wisdom required the total conversion of one’s being, a displacement from the life one previously lived.
Convinced of such a necessity, how would one convert oneself? First, one would choose a school, and follow a path exemplified by its vision of perfection, embodied in its image of the sage.5placeholder In other words, one’s praxis would be constrained and dogmatic, it would demand humility, and through exercise and attention at each instant one would align oneself with the ideal. One’s choice of school would also be limited. From the third-century BC, four schools and two spiritual traditions of philosophy dominated: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, and the traditions of Skepticism and Cynicism.6placeholder After the third century AD, Platonism alone was authoritative.7placeholder Of course the schools had different visions of the good life, but they were all philosophical schools—their shared horizon was wisdom. Although wisdom is “nothing more than the vision of things as they are” and a life lived in accordance with that vision, it is also never quite attainable.8placeholder The tension created by seeing the quotidian world as abnormal in its inauthentic self-satisfaction, while seeing that the cure is a life dedicated to the impossible, made the philosopher, regardless of school, strange: “One does not know how to classify him, for he is neither a sage nor a man like other men.”9placeholder So, there is something we can call distinctly philosophical across the schools, and something characteristic of the philosopher: a shared ideal, a shared displacement, an overlap in values. “[F]or all of them, the philosophical life will be an effort to live and think according to the norm of wisdom, it will be a movement, a progression, though a never-ending one, toward this transcendent state.”10placeholder
To do philosophy is to engage in spiritual exercise aimed at wisdom, and this always entails the exercise of reason.11placeholder “Generally [the exercises] consist, above all, in self-control and meditation.”12placeholder Different schools will interpret the form that these practices take differently; “Self-control is fundamentally being attentive to oneself: an unrelaxing vigilance for the Stoics, the renunciation of unnecessary desires for the Epicureans.”13placeholder Meditation is the “‘exercise’ of reason,” “a rational, imaginative, or intuitive exercise that can take extremely varied forms,”14placeholder but will involve contemplation of the nature of reality, logic, and virtue. Again, the aim of these efforts, although in contemplation of theory, is practical: a new sensibility, a (cosmic) seeing.15placeholder In Tractarian language, the aim is ethical—ethics not understood as a branch of study but as a way of being:
“If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language. // In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. // The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man” (Wittgenstein 2014, 6.43).
Epictetus drew the distinction between the theoretical dimension of philosophy and its exercise sharply, the former being the foundation of a school’s dogmata whose repetition, reflection and inscription allow one to alter one’s perception and exercise wisdom in the present instant.16placeholder The emphasis is on mastering one’s outlook rather than on acquiring knowledge of the cosmos, evident, for example, in Marcus Aurelius’ attentive practice:
“For Marcus, by contrast [with the opium-eating De Quincey], the consideration of the infinity of time and space is an active process; this is made quite clear by his repeated admonitions to ‘represent to himself’ and ‘think of’ the totality of things. We have to do here with a traditional spiritual exercise which utilizes the faculties of the imagination. De Quincey speaks of a distortion of the instant, which takes on monstrous proportions. Marcus, by contrast, speaks of an effort to imagine the infinite and the all, in order that all instants and places may be seen reduced to infinitesimal proportions. In Marcus’ case, this voluntary exercise of the imagination presupposes a belief in the classical Stoic cosmological scheme: the universe is situated within an infinite void, and its duration is comprised within an infinite time, in which periodic rebirths of the cosmos are infinitely repeated. Marcus’ exercise is intended to provide him with a vision of human affairs capable of replacing them within the perspective of universal nature. // Such a procedure is the very essence of philosophy. We find it repeated—in identical form, beneath superficial differences of vocabulary—in all the philosophical schools of antiquity” (Hadot 1995, 184).
A shared ideal of the desirability of ever-elusive wisdom, a shared strangeness in the person of the philosopher, a shared incarnation of theory through spiritual exercise, and, finally, universal preoccupations or themes across the schools, such as death and attentiveness to the present moment, which unify philosophy as a coherent movement.17placeholder The essential nature of philosophy understood thus is therapeutic—it aims to heal us of misapprehensions and clarify our vision. Perhaps it would do so through specific therapeutics such as: “research (zetesis), thorough investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening (akroasis), attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia), and indifference to indifferent things. [Or through] reading, meditations (meletai), therapies of the passions, remembrance of good things, self -mastery (enkrateia), and the accomplishment of duties.”18placeholder Perhaps, for a Platonist, we would seek therapy through dialogue, the dialectical exercise emphasising less the answer to our problems than the transformation engendered through engagement with them.19placeholder Such wisdom we might thereby attain we would embody only in the act: “this was a conversion that always needed to be reconquered”.20placeholder Always we would do philosophy as a means of, and as the expression of, self-mastery—both means and end, impossible and vital.
This is not philosophy as theory. It is philosophy as a certain kind of clarifying activity first, with the written reflection of the activity lying a distant second; its proof lies in the experience of the truths it proclaims, their undeniability when exercised—in the life of the philosopher.21placeholder But because of our emphasis as the ages proceeded on the practice of the exegesis of the schoolmasters’ texts, because of the need for all ancient systems of Western thought to legitimise themselves as philosophies, because of philosophy’s absorption into Christianity and the subsequent distinction between theology and philosophy (the latter reduced to its exegetical, abstract-theoretical dimension, divorced from the spiritual exercises which now formed part of a Christian mysticism) this view of philosophy faded from sight.22placeholder For Hadot, we have Nietzsche, Bergson and existentialism—their anti-systematic, concrete attitude—to thank for drawing philosophy back into the realm of lived experience, insofar as this view survives.23placeholder We have Hadot too, and we have Wittgenstein. I am moved by Hadot’s hope that we can still practice a form of spiritual exercise. The first step is to recall “the existence of a highly rich and varied Western tradition,”24placeholder as we have, but the next is to translate it into a contemporary language. “There can be no question, of course, of imitating stereotyped schemas. After all, did not Socrates and Plato urge their disciples to find the solutions they needed by themselves?”25placeholder To be a living thing, philosophy must be a language we can speak, and in trying to voice it, we may transform its expression.
03.03.25, ii.
I see in Hadot a hope that our adoption of a tradition we read from the work of a philosopher can create philosophy anew at any moment. In applying a paradigm to something new, or in the attempt to internalise the philosopher’s meaning, we will make (creative) mistakes, but there is a hope here that it is in these spaces, if the spirit is right, that philosophy as a mode of existence, attentive to the moment and seeking clarity, self-aware, will endure.
This may be pushing Hadot slightly. His project is an advocacy for the relevance in modern times of ‘old truths’,26placeholder even if he recognises philosophers that emerge throughout history, including Wittgenstein, or Nietzsche, as recapturing this old, existential sense of philosophy.27placeholder I want to say that we can find the philosophical spirit in new paragons, without recourse to the old. Should we not engage with the language that speaks to us? Why not make of Nietzsche himself a master, who apprehended the concrete spirit and made of his life a philosophy and poetry? Must we reach through him to Socrates? Must we rely on ancient forms? Perhaps Nietzschean dogmata are impossible to construct (he would damn us for creating from his life a school! for the very cowardice of seeking a master) but that itself would be a light—we would still be searching for wisdom in the image of another who sought beautifully; and more beautifully because our school would demand that we find the solutions in our own lives; we would still through our struggles and attempts embody a philosophical spirit; we would still, perhaps above all, be attentive, turned towards a yea-saying to life through a consideration of the denial of death, lifted soaring above our lives and thrown back into them; we would see the world and its abysses with eagle eyes.28placeholder
We cannot stick to the old formulae, Hadot says, but must translate them into our language and world. This is how philosophy remains eternal. But he recognises in a way that I am glossing over that we will need a standard against which to judge the philosophical, and that this standard is best exemplified in the attitudes of those who first practised philosophy as a way of life. This is how we recognise in Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard (or Schopenhauer, Goethe, Descartes, even Kant) the flowering of the philosophical.29placeholder Hadot would not have us discard the valuable perspective we gain from the ancient world, which enriches our forays, our essays into perplexity.
I want to say that this standard is exemplified in the ancients but is independent of them, that we recognise in them a mirror of our own understanding, so that there is a sense of philosophy as eternally available and familiar to reason, so that in truth the standard is within us and self-evident. Philosophy, we see in the doing of it, is a spiritual practice. Virtue, we feel in the attempt, is our life; logic, our speech. We can recognise wisdom, but wisdom, to be wisdom, must be made.30placeholder I think for this reason Hadot can endorse a kind of ransacking of the tradition in search of a voice. In discussing Philo’s appropriation of Platonic formulae to translate the Bible, for example, or the way in which Ambrose and Plotinus spoke through Plato’s language—plagiarising, adopting “words and whole sentences” to convey their experience—he suggests that the creative translation and mistranslation of old formulations deepens and refreshes philosophy.
“What matters first of all is the prestige of the ancient and traditional formula, and not the exact meaning it originally had. The idea itself holds less interest than the prefabricated elements in which the writer believes he recognizes his own thought, elements that take on an unexpected meaning and purpose when they are integrated into a literary whole. This sometimes brilliant reuse of prefabricated elements gives an impression of ‘bricolage,’ to take up a word currently in fashion, not only among anthropologists but among biologists. Thought evolves by incorporating prefabricated and pre-existing elements, which are given new meaning as they become integrated into a rational system. It is difficult to say what is most extraordinary about this process of integration: contingency, chance, irrationality, the very absurdity resulting from the elements used, or, on the contrary, the strange power of reason to integrate and systematize these disparate elements and to give them a new meaning” (Hadot 1995, 65).
It is the insights of the living philosophers, recognised in and echoed through the bricolage of the old masters’ language, expressed in translation, that matters here. Because it is the life of the living philosopher through which the old elements are being integrated that reveals philosophy anew, I want to say that we can look directly at a Wittgenstein as our ideal and fashion from his work a meaning. We need a place to begin; I want to say that philosophy is always possible, from anywhere, and that the echoes of the voices of our predecessors, garbled as we might receive them, can call us to the attempt.
A Collision
04.03.25
I have presented through Hadot a view of philosophy and an intimation of how I think the Tractatus could be approached, but Hadot himself approaches the book from a different angle. He finds in it a resemblance to negative theology and is drawn to its mysticism above its emphasis on philosophy-as-askesis. He sees in it a paradoxical metaphysics and a mystical language of unsaying, instead of an attempt at translation and a demonstration through the attempt of a grasp of what it means to be a philosopher. I mean that Hadot draws out the essence of what philosophy is in his oeuvre but won’t quite attribute to the Tractatus the expression of this essence.31placeholder He praises it for exemplifying a tradition, I want to say, not so much of lucid wisdom as mystical insight. Let me paint the picture.
05.03.25
He encounters Wittgenstein in a mystical state of mind.32placeholder Hadot is preoccupied with Damascius and his pseudo-Tractarian observations. As he paraphrases him:
“To say that the Principle is unknowable and inconceivable is by no means to name the Principle; it is simply to recognize that there are insurmountable limits to human language: ‘By saying of the Principle that it is unknowable,’ says Damascius, ‘we do not affirm anything of it; we ascertain the state of our spirit as regards it.’ Or better: ‘What we demonstrate is our ignorance regarding it, our incapacity to speak of it, our aphasia'” (Hadot 1970, 39–40).
Hadot understands this as a drawing of limits to language from the inside: “Rational discourse has led us to conceive a principle of all that is and all that is named” beyond which a silence that asserts our impotence to transcend language must follow.33placeholder And Damascius is interesting, indeed, in attempting to circumvent the immediate paradox seemingly present in the Tractatus of naming the unnameable by shifting the weight of our attention to ourselves and our lost voices.
“What was Wittgenstein’s purpose in writing the Tractatus?” Hadot takes as a first step to an answer the approach adopted by Russell: the purpose is to determine the conditions under which a language can be logically perfect, which means, determining the conditions of sense in our language use.34placeholder Philosophical language is language used wrongly—nonsense—for Hadot’s Wittgenstein, at first glance because philosophical propositions refer to no facts of the world, where their lack of reference to the factual displays a lack of logical (i.e., world-mirroring) form, admitting “elements whose exact signification cannot be determined”.35placeholder
To address the apparent paradox of the Tractatus’ philosophical self-proclamations, Hadot draws on the saying-showing distinction:36placeholder that the logic of facts is made manifest through the proposition without (an impossible) direct representation.37placeholder Thus we have found a limit to sense, an answer to the question of its conditions: “language ceases to have a sense, i.e., ceases to be representative, ceases to say, when it seeks to express itself as language; language itself cannot say itself”.38placeholder And now we understand better that the reason philosophical language is nonsensical is because of its reflexivity, its tendency to investigate its own structure, its desire to step outside of language in order to survey it.39placeholder But the world is our language. The Tractatus shows this all to us, circumventing a paradox not so much by ascertaining the aphasia of our spirits as manifesting a pre-eminent world.
How is language employed? Hadot draws four modes from the Tractatus: the representative—the use of fact-referring propositions, those ‘with a logical form’; the tautological—the use of the propositions of logic, saying nothing but forming part of the symbolism in the way that is part of mathematics, not nonsensical but without sense; the indicative—the use of the two preceding, ‘genuine’ propositions in their showing aspect, which through their saying “render present ‘the logical architecture of the world'”; and the absurd—the confused misuse of propositions producing “signs with no signification”, the production of nonsense.40placeholder He now draws a further distinction: what the indicative use of language shows is that language has a sense, but Wittgenstein has spoken absurdly and this also shows something: a use of language indicative of language’s insurmountable limit.41placeholder “There is a whole domain in which language by its very inexactitude shows what it cannot express. What counts, then, is not what it says to us, but what it allows us to strive after.”42placeholder And what is that? God, the ‘I’, an absolute ethics, the mystical.
Very schematically—for Hadot we notice from the Tractatus first the parallel between our language and the world; that we can only express reality through the model of our language, and that therefore our language is insurmountable.43placeholder This corresponds to the insight—recognised from the mere reading of the words, rather than intended as a proposition—that we are the limits of our worlds, that the insurmountability of our language is the insurmountability of ourselves, that we are in some sense our worlds, a limit and a totality impossible to escape.44placeholder “But in colliding with this impossibility” in the very discovery of myself as a limit, I recognise myself as “a subject which is not part of the world”.45placeholder In conjunction with the recognition that there is no necessity beyond logical necessity, nothing pre-eminent in the world, even ‘myself’ (which is not the transcendent, collided ‘I’ but reality itself), I see that there can be no ethics, no value above any other, except an ethics beyond the empirical: a transcendental ethics founded in the (unworldly) absolute.46placeholder In expressing all of this I speak absurdly but what I wish to indicate is that sense of the collision, that feeling of the limit (or, equivalently, the whole), not “the abstract idea of the limits of language [but] the feeling of them”—what Wittgenstein calls ‘the mystical’.47placeholder In my absurd expression of the unsayable, through this nonsense, I mean to indicate a lack, my inability to speak, that aphasia in the face of God, indicative, in other words, not of an architecture of meaning but of my want of it.48placeholder
“I am obliged to accept the use of a logically inexact language, a language which does not represent anything but evokes it. I rediscover the value of language as incantation; I see somehow that the most fundamental form of language may be poetry, which brings the world to life before my eyes. It is in this poetic language, in this indicative or evocative function of language that I have the right to say: ‘there is truly an ineffable; it shows itself; it is the mystical’ (6.522)” (Hadot 1970, 52).
That is beautiful—what more do I want of Hadot? I wanted to criticise him for a metaphysical reading of the Tractatus but I forgive him for drawing out of it the distinction between the logical and ethical that it presents, and clarifying where the mystical lies. I want to suggest that we can read the Tractatus as Hadot does here but also through his metaphilosophy: we can read it as an attempt to see the world as it is, and to live in accordance with reason. We can read the Tractatus as a spiritual exercise ready to be translated into a life, aporetically pregnant; a search for a wisdom felt as an impossibility; a therapeutics both in the sense of providing us a means of approaching a language for the expression of those things we confusedly attempt to say, and in the sense of reminding us of what philosophy as the experience of wonder is, displacing us from and placing us back into the world, making us strange, capable of converting us. We could use such a rich language, starting afresh, to see the world sub specie aeternitatis, as a philosopher, Hadot is saying, would.
Works Cited
Carnap, Rudolf. 1971 (1934). The Logical Syntax of Language. Translated by Amethe Smeaton. Repr. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Davidson, Arnold Ira. 1995. ‘Introduction’. In Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, by Pierre Hadot, edited by Arnold Ira Davidson, translated by Michael Chase. Blackwell.
Hadot, Pierre. 1970. ‘Reflection on the Limits of Language: Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”’. Translated by John A. McFarland. Cross Currents 20 (1): 39–54.
———. 1987. Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique. 2e éd. Paris: Études Augustiniennes.
———. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited by Arnold Ira Davidson. Translated by Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2004. Wittgenstein et les limites du langage. Bibliothèque d’histoire de la philosophie. Paris: J. Vrin.
Hymers, Michael. 2024. ‘Hadot’s Later Wittgenstein: A Critique’. Philosophical Investigations 47 (2): 178–203.
Laugier, Sandra. 2011. ‘Pierre Hadot as a Reader of Wittgenstein’. Paragraph 34 (3): 322–37.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2009 (1891). ‘Only a Fool! Only a Poet!’ In Poems for the Millennium. Vol. 3: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, 747–49. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999 (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by Charles Kay Ogden. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.
———. 2014. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by David Francis Pears and Brian McGuinness. Routledge Great Minds. New York: Routledge.
———. 2023. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by Alexander Booth. London: Penguin Books.
See Hadot (1995), based on Hadot’s original (1987) French essays.
Hadot 1995, 265.
Hadot 1995, 56.
Hadot 1995, 265.
Hadot 1995, 57.
Hadot 1995, 56.
Hadot 1995, 56.
Hadot 1995, 58. This ‘seeing of things as they are’ need not imply a mysticism. Laugier characterises Hadot as interested in conversion to ordinary life—a return to daily life after a rupture with it, the world converted, or rather, the philosopher. As she beautifully puts it: “We must simply learn to look: conversion is a turn of the glance” (Laugier 2011, 330). Is a right seeing attainable, then? Perhaps this conversion represents a kind of mastery only present in the ever-renewed effort.
Hadot 1995, 58.
Hadot 1995, 59.
Hadot 1995, 59.
Hadot 1995, 59.
Hadot 1995, 59.
Hadot 1995, 59.
Hadot 1995, 59–60.
Hadot 1995, 191–2.
Hadot 1995, 68–9.
Hadot 1995, 84. These are from Philo of Alexandria’s lists of (predominantly Stoic) spiritual exercises.
Hadot 1995, 91–93.
Hadot 1995, 104.
Hadot 1995, 107.
See Hadot 1995, Chap. 2: Philosophy, Exegesis and Creative Mistakes.
Hadot 1995, 108.
Hadot 1995, 108.
Hadot 1995, 108.
Hadot 1995, 108.
See Davidson’s overview of Hadot’s work, Hadot 1995, 33.
See Nietzsche 2009.
See Davidson 1995 for a fuller list.
04.03.25: I am reading Laugier after writing this, and her characterisation of Hadot is as a thinker completely open to the present and the urgency of language praxis: “Language is always there before me, there is no new beginning, no foundation. I cannot return to the origins of philosophy. It is too late. The greatness of Hadot’s philosophy is to keep to this as a principle. The words of dead writers that we read today live only through the use we now have for their thoughts” (Laugier 2011, 332).
Perhaps this is unfair. It is anachronistic given that Hadot’s ideas of philosophy as a way of life were published later than his engagement with Wittgenstein. Indeed, that engagement may have formed the basis of his hermeneutics (see Hymers (2024, 181–2) translating Hadot (2004, 11)). Hadot has put me in the privileged position of having the benefit of hindsight, and I mean here only to distinguish two views which were articulated by one man, not to blame him but to unfold a broader perspective for interpretation.
See Hadot 1970, 40.
Hadot 1970, 40.
Hadot 1970, 42.
Hadot 1970, 42–3.
Hadot here steps over Rudolph Carnap’s suggestion that the sentences must be overcome after the quasi-syntax has had its say. He also (against the logical positivists) rejects the possibility that a metalanguage could save the Tractatus from paradox, He asserts, (alongside Russell and Wittgenstein) the universality of discourse: that no language, on whatever proposed meta-level, can express the inexpressible, bound as it would be by being a language. (Hadot 1970, 43–4, 46).
See Hadot 1970, 44.
Hadot 1970, 44 (emphasis in the original).
See Hadot 1970 44–5.
Hadot 1970, 47; emphasis in the original. This division has the great benefit of clearly distinguishing the sinnlos from the unsinning in the Tractatus.
Hadot 1970, 47.
Hadot 1970, 47.
Hadot 1970, 47–48.
Hadot 1970, 48.
Hadot 1970, 48.
Hadot 1970, 49 (my emphasis). MacFarland’s translation of Hadot’s translation (“Le sentiment de monde comme tout limité, est le sentiment mystique”) of Tractatus 6.45 is interesting here, it’s emphasis more firmly on the sense of limitation which provokes the transcendent viewpoint: “The feeling of the world as completely limited is the mystical feeling” (my emphasis; cf. Pears/McGuiness: “Feeling the world as a limited whole […]” or Ogden “The feeling that the world is a limited whole […]”).
See Hadot 1970, 51, who emphasises, in addition to the feeling of the inexpressible, the feeling of wonder (or ecstasy) at existence, and the feeling of oneness. All of these are coincident.